A Technique to Enhance the Energy Efficiency of Multipath Routing Protocol for MANETs

Mobile Ad hoc networks(MANETs) are power constrained since nodes are operated with limited battery. A node not only sends it own packets but also packets of other nodes. However, the energy consumption during routing remains a key challenge. In this paper, we have proposed a multipath routing protocol which is referred here as energy efficient multipath routing (E2MR). The proposed approach uses a cost metric for path selection, which is a function of residual battery power and current traffic load at a node. Through extensive simulation, we have compared the proposed E2MR protocol with a few existing multipath routing protocols. From simulation results, it is observed that the proposed scheme has lower end-to-end delay, higher packet delivery ratio and higher residual energy level than other protocols.